About Bowland Maths

Welcome to the Bowland Maths website. Here you will find a
collection of free resources to support rich
problem-solving activities in secondary school maths,
including classroom material, assessment tasks and
professional development resources. The material is aimed
at Key Stage 3, the first years of secondary school in
England, but can be adapted for a wide range of ages and
abilities.

Bowland Maths began in 2006 to address the concern that
pupils were losing interest in mathematics at the start of
secondary school, with the aim of promoting context-rich
problem solving that pupils would find fun. The first
collection of material was released in 2008 after two years
of development, with a DVD made freely available to all
English schools. The assessment tasks and related PD were
released in 2010 and 8 new classroom projects were added in
2012. The website was completely re-designed in 2014.

All of the Bowland Maths materials can be downloaded from
this website and they are free for non-commercial
educational use.

Getting started

The Classroom Projects –
called Case Studies after the problems set to
students in institutions such as Harvard Business
School – each take 3 or more lessons to complete. These
are the best way to get pupils engaged in rich,
extended problem solving activities set in a diversity
of real-life and fantasy contexts. A guide to choosing
a suitable project is available here.

Or, you could start by browsing one of the video-led
Professional development modules.
Each module focuses on one of the pedagogical
challenges of using context-rich problem solving in the
classroom, and includes several short, one-lesson
activities, along with suggested lesson plans, for you
to try in your own classroom.

Another good starting point - if you don't want to
start with a long project - are the Assessment Tasks which are nothing
like traditional tests and also provide rich
problem-solving experiences for students.

The new website

The Bowland Maths Website has been completely re-designed
as of April 2014. We hope the new layout is clearer and
more accessible.

We have added supplementary assessment guides for seven of the
Case Studies, and a section on the recent Lesson Study project.

The improvements are not yet complete - over the coming
months we will be looking at adding search capabilities to help find
appropriate material, and also trying to make more of the Case Studies
accessible to tablet computers that can't run Flash.

If you have any feedback, or encounter any teething troubles, please
contact us.

There is also a contact form
should you wish to send questions or comments to the
Bowland team. Please bear in mind that Bowland has no
ongoing funding, so maintenance and support is limited.

Discussion forum

For UK teachers, there is a Community
forum for Bowland Maths on the NCETM website. We have
considered a dedicated Bowland forum but are unsure of
the demand. Let us know if
you would find that useful (but remember, a lively
forum would depend on your contributions!)